Community-focused indoor environment company Climate Experts pride themselves on educating clients on their options and offering the most thorough air conditioning, heating, and indoor air quality evaluations in Melbourne, Florida. But as the company grew and more new employees were brought on board, it became challenging for the sales managers to ride along on enough calls to get a good understanding of how the sales reps performed. If they were going to increase their close rate, they needed to identify where more training was needed.

A lack of insight into potential bad habits

“Before Rilla, our biggest pain point was that we didn’t have the time to be in the field with everybody. We were bringing on a lot of new employees and trying to be there with every single person at the same time. It’s impossible.” — Chris Sturgill, Field Operations Manager, Climate Experts

As Climate Experts grew, it became tougher to know what was happening on sales calls, which made training difficult. “One of the biggest challenges was having one service manager for several technicians and reps,” explains Derek Cormier, CEO and Co-founder of Climate Experts. They would develop some bad habits, and we didn’t know what was happening. We weren’t able to do enough ridealongs to train them in the processes.”

Better training and virtual ridealongs with Rilla

“It’s a great training tool for the technicians,” says Customer Experience Rep Robyn Ellis. We grab snippets that are positive and share them with the rest of the team, highlighting where they did a good job. It motivates the other team members to want to be recognized—maybe even in the next meeting.”

For Cormier, the biggest advantage of adding Rilla was the tools and features that allowed him to review calls quickly. “I don’t have to go on a ridealong,” he explains. “I can quickly see if the process is being done just by reviewing the call on the scorecard and seeing the whole call transcribed. I can know that all the work I put into the business is being utilized.”

The results

Rilla has allowed Climate Experts to dramatically boost their close rates and increase the average sale size.

“After implementing Rilla, we started to see our close rate move steadily up,” notes Cormier. “Our technicians sometimes had close rates as low as 15%, and we moved those up to as high as 40%.”

“Our turnover rate of opportunities we ran went from 10% to 50%,” Cormier continues. “We were turning over more than 40% of the opportunities to a sales professional and then closing more of those jobs.”

“One of my lead technicians was averaging around $550 per ticket,” says Sturgill. “After we started using Rilla for a couple months, he’s around $950—almost double his performance.”

Cormier explains why they saw such impressive results. “We’re able to do 30 to 40 virtual ridealongs in a day,” he says. We’ve made our own custom scorecard so we can use AI technology to look into a call, score it in just 10 minutes, and know how we need to coach the rep.”

Rilla has proven itself to everyone on the team, according to Sturgill. “Seeing their results improve has helped them make drastically more money as well as improve the company overall,” he says.